Posts by Jeremiah Peschka

Spinlocks are a building block of concurrent programs. As long as you have more than one actor in your system, you’re going to need to be able to control access. We use spinlocks to maintain mutual exclusion – if process 1 is changing something in memory, we want to prevent all other processes from doing…

For a recent class on databases, we had to put together a database as a final graduate project. Rather than let my work go to waste, I figured that it would be fun to share it with the world. spooky bois and spooky data Getting the Sample Database First off, this will only work on…

As a fun summer project, I’m working on a Rogue-like video game. While our overall goal is to keep ourselves entertained while we learn something new, we’re keeping a careful approach to writing our software. Over the last week, we’ve decided it was time to implement combat. Rogue-like Redux If you play video games and…

I don’t have any Apple devices. I used to own a bunch of them, but over time I’ve switched from an iPhone to a Nexus phone; I have an Android tablet; my laptop and desktop both run Linux. Somewhere along the way, I decided that I should either delete my old Apple ID or remove…

N.B. This was originally written as a term paper for Portland State University’s CS202 – Programming Systems course. I’ve been working with object oriented programming (OOP) and software development for longer than I’d care to admit. I’ve found OOP to be cumbersome and prone to odd behavior. Shared mutable state has caused me a lot…

Hooray, we can run SQL Server on Linux inside of a Docker container. That certainly makes it easy to try out SQL Server on Linux and for developers to run SQL Server, regardless of their chosen operating system. But what if we want to update that SQL Server container? There’s an easy way to update…

If you use SQL Server, you’re used to the database doing page verification for you as the sensible default. If you want SQL Server to not verify data, you have to do a bit of extra work. Naturally, I would’ve assumed that this was the case with other databases since, after all, having good data on…

I figured it would be fun to document the hardware and software that I use to get everything done on a regular basis. Even if it’s for nobody but future me, this should be a fun post to review later. Pictured: the computer I actually need. The Desktop I built the desktop computer myself, so…

Design problems are fun. It’s a chance to build something that lasts and do it right. Plus, those bad decisions are going to hang around forever. This is our chance to make the right decision. Who needs design? Our Feature We’re building a system to store events that have occurred in an our application. This…

A few weeks ago, I mentioned Rust Doc Days. This was an event where the Rust community made a conscious effort to improve Rust’s documentation. Throughout this blog post, “we” refers to the quasi-official Rust docs team. How did it go? The first Rust Doc Days was, we felt, a successful event. We deliberately kept the event low…